The documentation of my large scale, generative music box is now online! With videos and sound recordings. You can find it here.

“If you want to be successful on YouTube, you should build things like remote-controlled beer crates.“, Kati once said to me. Besides the tempting promise of viral online fame, I found that quite a funny idea! So last Saturday, I built one. Let’s see if Kati was right with her thesis!

Here’s the video (Caution: I also put “heavy metal” music on it, because I think that helps to support her postulation):

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[UPDATE: Here’s the final documentation of the installation including videos and sound recordings.]

Dear Interwebz! Since it will take a while until I can post a new project here on my website, I figured it might be nice to let you know what I’m working on right now. My plan is to build a very big hand cranked music box. It will use real instruments – an electric guitar, a keyboard and a drum set. I have worked on the keyboard and guitar mechanisms so far. Here’s a recent photo:

In early summer, the machine will be ready and on public display in a glass pavillion in Wroclaw, Poland. Everyone will be free to operate it 24 hours a day. I’ve drawn a floorplan of the setup as I imagined it, but of course the details might still change. The installation will be called “Music Construction Machine”.

Usually one music box repeats the same melody over and over again. But I’ve decided to build the Music Construction Machine in such way that it generates ever changing melodies. It does that by following an algorithm, which is implemented in mechanical hardware, consisting mainly of ropes, pulleys, springs and weights. The pulleys will drive many different mechanisms, which then will operate the instruments. Besides producing a (hopefully) interesting music, there will be plenty of moving parts to be seen and to be investigated inside the pavillion once visitors start operating the crank.

Below you can see the melody mechanism for the keyboard machine. It uses two pulleys of different sizes, which are driven by one rope loop. Both pulleys produce a linear sinewave movement. Due to their different circumferences, the two resulting sinewaves have deviating frequencies. The linear sinewave oscillations then drive the subsequent mechanisms, which move two carriages left and right over the keyboard. From time to time (triggered by a separate rhythm mechanism), the carriages are pulled away from the driving mechanism and pushed onto the keyboard, where they play two tones at the same time.
Although the mechanisms follow a simple inherent logic, which determines the sequence of tones that will be played, the overall behavior of the system is so complex that the sequence appears to be unpredictable for a listener. The result is a melody which is sometimes harmonic, sometimes not, but it definitely has a lot of variation.

Let’s have also a look at the guitar machine! At the current state this has two mechanisms. One picks the strings and the other operates the fret board. Let’s start with the picks: Six levers are constantly moving up and down, with plectra attached to their ends. All of those levers are moved by individual pulleys – and again – those pulleys all have different circumferences. The result is that each plectrum moves in a slightly different speed up and down and the played melody is basically an interference pattern.

The mechanism below is a ratchet mechanism. It starts with a pulley, which moves a lever up and down. Each time the lever moves upwards, it grabs one tooth of the sawblade-shaped wheel and spins it by 45°. This wheel drives then another lever, which moves a steel pipe up and down the fret board in a sinewave pattern.

You can see the result below. The mechanism creates very psychedelic sounds and the effect is overall very dominant. Which I like. What I don’t like, is the fact that this effect occurs in such a periodic pattern. Therefore, I have decided to add another mechanism to this construction, which will make the pattern appear more irregular.

Overall, I have to say that the work is on a very good track. Initially, I had some issues which were mainly caused by too much friction, but now (almost 200 ball bearings later) I’m very pleased with the behavior of the machine. Everything makes a sturdy impression, which is essential regarding that it will be operated by the public, day and night, without supervision.

The finished installation will be exhibited from June 17th onwards in Wroclaw, which is one of the current European culture capitals in 2016. The Goethe Institut is organizing the exhibition of the machine as part of their Pop Up Pavillon project. I also want to thank Musikhaus Thomann for supporting my construction with a generous donation of instruments, as well as light and sound equipment.

You can find more photos of this project in high resolution, published under a CC BY 3.0 license, in this album.

PRAYDIO is a combination of a decorative, golden plastic crucifix found in a one Euro shop and a CB-radio. When someone approaches the installation, channel one of the radio opens for ethereal communication. Anyone with a CB-radio within the broadcasting range can reply the prayers, providing instant answers and guidance.

Kati and me built this little installation at Multimadeira, an artist run residency/festival on the beautiful volcanic island of Madeira. For some reasons, there are plenty of CB-radios around, so there’s always a good chance to get a response to your prayer. But sometimes, Jesus also starts to babble some unintelligible verses on his own.

My niece Carlotta has been visiting us those days again. She loves building stuff and all kinds of technical things and the last time she was here, she has built this awesome robot.

This time, she wanted to make a Halloween costume. We were both totally excited about this hillarious Jetpack, which was featured in a Japanese Gameshow. At the end, she built one for herself, which she named “Jetpack 9000”. It’s very handy for Halloween, as there’s plenty of space inside the fake belly where she can store her sweets.

Charles Carcopino and me recently gave a workshop in Belgium about computing with air as part of the Mons2015 Cultural Capital program. The workshop lead to an exhibition which I’ve documented here. Don’t miss the video!

I’ve built a giant pinball machine and it’s super fun to play with! You can try it out, too, if you visit the current exhibition at Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg. Or, if this is too far, read my longer post about it and watch the video here.

Kati and me built a new machine: It’s a painting with a joystick! Control the apple and explore Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem’s 1592 painting “The Fall of Man”.

Check the awesome video!

After the overwhelming success of my installation Suck the Balls! at Goethe-Institut Cracow last year, the Goethe-Institut in Prague asked me to build a similar one for their building.

The installation opened last week and will be running for the next half year. This time, the pneumatic track is roughly 70 meters long. It goes from the entrance hall, through the staircase into the first floor, where it passes the institute’s library, then it makes its way back to the ground floor. The balls race through the entire pipe system within 11 seconds, which makes them in average 22.91 km/h fast (The video above is in slow motion). That’s stunning to watch and fun to play with.
Give it a visit when you’re in Prague!

Last week, Kati and me gave a workshop on hi-speed d.i.y. robot construction for the School of Machines, Making & Make Believe, an art & tech summer school in Berlin.

The robots are shown next Friday at the Kunstquartier Bethanien at ScholOfMaaa’s final show.

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